


As Many Lullabyes

by foxinthestars



Series: As Many Lullabyes [1]
Category: Psychic Force
Genre: Amnesia, And some warmth mixed in with all that, Angst, Blanket Permission, Canon Character Deaths (off-camera), Captivity, Crueltide, Evil Alternate Personalities, Gen, Human Experimentation, Insomnia, Manipulation, Secret Incestuous Attraction, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-01 09:55:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2768924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxinthestars/pseuds/foxinthestars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the horrors he's been through, Keith can never seem to fall asleep.  As the years pass, everyone has their own way to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Lab

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MarsDragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarsDragon/gifts).



> Thanks to beta readers [yhlee](http://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee) ([etothey](http://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey)), [NightsMistress](http://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress), and [elfwreck](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfwreck/pseuds/Elfwreck).
> 
> Anyone who wants to use my work as a basis for their own fanfic, fanart, podfic, translation, etc. has my permission to do so. Just credit me as appropriate.
> 
> For those happening by who have never heard of this Psychic Force thing, have [a canon overview post](http://last-impact.livejournal.com/11995.html) with playthroughs, scripts, and OVA. It’s a pretty short canon, a choice specimen of 90’s anime/fighting game insanity that offers compelling characters and an epically intricate and tragic story if you’re just willing to dig a little.

_Late 2008 (Exact Date Unknown)_

Keith lay curled against the steel wall, not in the corner where he could more easily be hemmed in, but near the center of its length with his ear resting against one of the cold, slick plates.

As unbearable as life in this laboratory-prison had been before, it was fathoms worse now, not because he had been given a taste of freedom to contrast it with — that was the one light in the darkness that kept him going — but because he had become a security risk. He had escaped. He had _killed_. None of the researchers were going to gamble their lives by coming into the room with him. Instead, they kept him sealed every waking hour in this steel box and interacted with him only through a speaker on the wall and an assortment of robotic arms that nested in the ceiling like a monstrous spider out of some science fiction nightmare. Those arms were strong enough to crush ice despite his every effort, and he lived beneath them knowing that they could come to come to life at any moment, sometimes for no apparent purpose except to terrorize him.

When the robot arms weren’t enough to conduct whatever experiment they wanted, the researchers also controlled the room’s ventilation and would pump in gas to render him unconscious. If he succumbed, he might wake in a heap on the floor hardly able to move, his entire body filled with a crushing ache and perhaps in one or more places the clawing of a new line of sutures. He might wake on his back with steel cuffs restraining him and electrodes studding his body to be set off one by one in hopes of controlling his power. Someday he might not wake at all. If they decided they were finished with him, there was nothing to stop them.

Even if he fell asleep on his own, there was no telling what would happen — and so he didn’t fall asleep on his own anymore, or so it seemed. In his cell, there was no sun nor even a clock to give him any sense of day or night or how long he had been here, only constant artificial light. With no darkness to put him fully to sleep and nothing to do in the light to keep him fully awake, the untold hours dissolved into a warily shallow trance, and he lay curled with his eyes closed. Sometimes he warmed himself with memories of Burn, ideas of what he might be doing now and when —not _if_ but _when_ , Keith told himself — they would meet again. Sometimes he wandered back over the books he had read before even that shadow of escape was taken from him, trying to retrace the stories or invent new ones to pass the time. Sometimes his mind settled into a stillness that was close to sleep, but he could never lose himself in thought or slumber because a part of him remained fixed upon the ever-present threat, always vigilant, always _listening_.

It was because they had left him alone so long to listen in the silence that he recognized the tiny sound inside the wall.

_phung-shhhhh…_

Keith sprang instantly to his feet, pivoting with a sweep of his hand. Ice sang into being all around the room, coating the walls — and sealing the vents against the gas. He retreated far enough for a clear view of the robotic arms and circled them, scanning for syringes, gas canisters, or anything of the kind, but his captors at least seemed to have learned that those things wouldn’t work on him. The last time he had come to this point, one of the arms had chased him down and pinned him while others fought to break the ice away, but physically restraining him didn’t stop him from using his power, and it had been a running battle for who knew how long, refreezing everything as quickly as they could unseal it until enough gas crept in through the momentary gaps that his head swam and he couldn’t keep up.

Now, however, even as he watched the arms with his heart pounding in his ears, not one of them moved. Perhaps a few minutes passed, long enough to wonder if he had only imagined the sound, but then the speaker crackled on.

“Listen, I don’t feel like playing with you today,” one of the usual male voices said, slowly and deliberately, with a metallic buzz that only sharpened the note of exasperation. “We both know this ends with you going to sleep. You can cooperate with us and make it quick and easy, or you can do it your way and keep yourself sealed in an airtight room, in which case it will be very slow and unpleasant. It’s up to you, but you’re really only hurting yourself.”

The voice cut out with a few pops, and Keith stared after it almost as if a person had spoken and then left the room. He knew already that he wasn’t going to cooperate. Whatever they wanted out of him, he could at least make them wait for it or fight for it, he at least had that much power, and it wasn’t entirely true that he knew how it ended — today might be the day Burn came for him, if he could just hold out a little longer.

This was a crazy notion, and it pulled paradoxically at his other hope, that Burn’s powers would stay forever hidden from everyone, even himself, so that no one would ever think of doing things like this to him. Even so, Keith clung to the fantasy of rescue like a talisman, if only to remind himself that he was more than a nameless vicious animal; he mattered to someone on the outside, someone who wouldn’t want him to give up.

Against the possibility that it was a trick, he kept pacing watchfully for some time longer, then settled against the middle of the wall again, against the thick layer of ice, which he now controlled well enough to stop its chill at the boundary of his skin. This time, he kept his eyes open as he sat watching, listening for any movement — and waiting.

And waiting.

It could have been hours, or a day or more in which nothing happened, but he knew better than to relax his vigil. The first changes he felt were an ache in his legs and a twitching hollow energy in his arms, followed, as more hours passed, by a spidery shimmer of blackness and color that scurried across the edges of his vision and the angles between the walls and ceiling but vanished if he focused on it directly. Those weren’t so unfamiliar, probably only the lack of normal sleep, and he kept waiting.

More immeasurable time crept past. If a voice had come on the speaker to tell him that a week had gone by, it would not have surprised him. Little by little, he felt the air growing heavy, and he carefully allowed cold to bleed out of the ice to make breathing it more comfortable, but even freezing the entire room solid couldn’t have stopped the inevitable. A dull ache in his head gradually drew tighter into an intense pounding, slow acid settled into his muscles and burned deeper bit by bit, and each unknown span of waiting pressed the heaving of his chest on minutely but inexorably faster. It was as if the breathless fire of a hard run were slowly creeping up on him, but no amount of the stifled air could soothe it; it only seared deeper and deeper until he was hugging himself against the pain and panting desperately, his chest bursting with that insatiable hunger as well as sheer exhaustion that demanded how much longer he could possibly withstand this.

When sparks began to form around the edges of his vision and fall away toward the center, he knew it couldn’t be much longer, but the rising bitterness of another defeat was pushed aside by a sudden panic. He had no idea how long it had been since the voice on the speaker, since any evidence at all that anyone was watching. Could they have forgotten about him, or finally decided he wasn’t worth the trouble? If he didn’t relent, could he die like this?

Keith reeled under the sudden doubt. His hold on the ice had loosened, leaving it wet and slippery where he lay against it, and he slid down it to collapse on the floor, still curled in agony, still gasping with all his faltering strength. He couldn’t surrender, he couldn’t do their work for them, but he also couldn’t die — _I’ll never get out of here, I’ll never see Burn again if I die_ — and if he only had this chance, it was quickly slipping away…

When one of the robot arms finally groaned to life, reached out to a wall, and scraped down it through the ice, it gave him such a surge of relief that for a moment he didn’t even think to fight it — they weren’t going to let him die; this torture was about to end — but in the next moment, he knew that he had to fight no matter what happened. Cursing himself for ever forgetting that, he struggled to rise and raised his hand, but it was all he could do to follow in the bare-metal path with a slow, hoary frost.

It was too late. In his moment of hesitation, he had shown weakness. The robot arms spread out with all their claws and the ice groaned and crunched on every side under their attacks. Keith still fought to reseal what he could with frost, but it was no use. He was far beyond the point where he could keep up with all of them.

Still gasping for breath, when the gas hit him he couldn’t help pulling it in deep. He sagged to the floor, plunging away from the world as if into dark water. Something like water buffeted his fingers with a dull tingle as they lost the cold steel floor and washed away into nothing. He couldn’t see, couldn’t feel anything outside himself, and he clung desperately to the last sensations — his pounding head, his heaving chest, his burning throat — until even these were enveloped in blackness and he sank into oblivion.

*


	2. Sonia

_November 2009_

When Sonia took up the watch at command and control, it was 3 a.m. and NOA headquarters was quiet enough to hear the hum of the climate controls in the walls. Her cybernetic body did require daily rest, but three or four hours were enough, and she liked these quiet times as a chance to reflect. At first she had seized that chance with the hope that in searching her own mind she might find some clue to the memories she had lost. As months went by, that hope had grown so faded and tattered that it ached even to look at it, but by that time these early morning hours had taken on a sweetness of their own. They were a chance to watch over all her comrades in peace, to look toward a future, not a past, and perhaps that was a finer thing.

After all, that was what she had said to Keith.

Again and again she’d seen it in his eyes, that he felt for her what she felt for him, but again and again when she reached toward him with love, he’d turned away. _It wasn’t like this between us before,_ he had said; _you might have someone waiting for you; you might regret it if your memories return, and you can’t give up hope_.

Finally she’d had enough and cried, _How long am I supposed to throw away the life I have now, the memories I want to make now, for whatever it was that might never come back?_

And then he had finally, finally smiled at her, and apologized for trying to decide that for her, and let her draw closer to his face with her hands in his hair, his hands sliding around behind her waist, until their lips met…

It hadn’t been any mere excuse to get through to him, and she still believed it.

Still, she couldn’t help longing for some other puzzle piece to interlock with the gift Keith had given her when she first woke in this cybernetic body: his memories of the few weeks he had known her before it happened.

She had a different face in those memories, and a different voice, with an Australian accent that Wong had failed to preserve and that she had too much dignity to affect. It had made her uncomfortable at first, like looking into a mirror and seeing the wrong image looking back, but she’d pursued it anyway. She wouldn’t feel that way if it meant nothing to her, and that in itself had told her that those memories were real.

Sometimes she even felt as if she could reach just barely through those secondhand memories and catch a trace of them from other side. Beyond Keith’s memory of waking in a hospital bed after an accident in the lab, that other face and voice whispering to him, _I’m Sonia; I’m going to get you out of here because I’m like you_ , in a fleeting glimmer she could _see_ the fear in his eyes relax toward fascination, feel the familiar buzz in her fingers as she arced electricity between them to prove that she was a Psychiccer, too. He had remembered her sitting by his bed teaching him the finer points of telepathy over hands of poker — how to spy on your opponent’s cards, how to shut out their spying or feed them false images — and if she dwelt on that memory, there were moments she could almost read the cards she’d had, even where he remembered being shut out of them.

But when that other voice remarked _I had to get good at this, I have a little sister_ , cruelly bare of any other clues, suddenly it was just out of reach. In the moments when those other eyes drifted off into the distance of a nervous, melancholy distraction that she hadn’t allowed Keith to see inside of, whatever thoughts she had been looking to then floated just beyond her fingertips now, even after months of straining to reach them.

Sonia shook off the mournful reverie; for now she had work to do. She re-checked all of the security sensors and cameras, set the computers to all the daily diagnostic routines, and began activating the automatic cleaning systems level by level, holding her mind open to anyone who might be disturbed. As she approached the top floor of the residential sector, she braced herself for the response she was trying not to expect…

_Go right ahead_ , Keith answered.

Sonia slumped back in her chair. _You’re still awake._

_I’m not… sleepy yet._

She felt him snag on the quibble between “sleepy” and “tired.” The latter was obvious; his telepathic voice, stronger and clearer than anyone else’s when he was well-rested, now felt muffled in a way that she had long since learned to recognize, and it resisted her vision like a fine mist as she reached out a bit more to see where he was.

When she came through it, she found that he was at least in bed this time, sitting up and reading a book — a prod at it revealed an adventure novel, which didn’t even surprise her, although one would almost think that he was _trying_ to keep himself awake.

_You really must take better care of yourself_ , she told him.

_I know_ , he admitted. That haze refracted things he would normally make certain to hide, and she also caught an echo of _I’m not doing this because it’s fun._

Or maybe she only knew that already. He covered up anything more than shreds of what it was that kept him awake at night so often, but the shreds were enough. She even knew already that it was worst on a night like this, the second after a mission, when those images were still fresh and no longer outbalanced by fatigue — and Keith didn’t have Sonia’s advantage of a recharge cycle that began at the flip of a switch. Sometimes he _couldn’t_ take better care of himself. At those times, for all her scolding, she knew that she would always be there for him, and in this case, she had an idea.

_This is unacceptable_ , she said firmly. _You’re in the wrong posture, and you’re reading the wrong book. Please put it away._

Keith resisted for a moment, but Sonia only maintaining a quiet presence with him was enough to coax him into marking his place and laying the book aside.

_Now, lie down._

He patiently leaned back and settled his head on his pillow.

_Relax. I will read_ _**to** _ _you._

She felt a small throb of anticipation from him and carefully concealed her own answering curl of mischief. Pulling her attention back to herself, she picked up the perfect book for the occasion from the shelf in C&C where it had sat untouched for longer than she could remember.

_Listen closely…_

_“Aaron, Charlotte: five five five four eight nine four. Aaron, Harold and Juanita: five five five seven three six four—”_

_That’s a phone book!_ he objected.

_**Listen.**_ Firm but gentle, she touched him with her mind and drew his attention, like a light hand on his chin turning his face toward her. _“Abbett, John S.: five five five nine three two two. Abrams, Daniel: five five five zero five six zero…”_

Keith gave her a pleading feeling like he might give her a look, but it was the kind meant to make her smile, not relent — and she did smile at this side of him that so few others ever saw. Underneath NOA’s leader with his determined strength and dignity, deeper even than the terrorized creature she had helped to rescue from that lab, there was a young man in whom one could still catch glimpses of a child.

_“Ackerman, T.: five five five three three nine eight. Ackerman-Jones, Rebecca: five five five, five five five two…”_

His long-suffering annoyance, with however facetious a twist, faded into grudging respect for her approach and finally pliant acceptance. He did listen, only unintentionally let his mind wander, and responded readily to that light touch bringing him back to her voice as, in this telepathic space, she watched over his bed, much as she had in those first borrowed memories.

It took longer than she expected, but at last, halfway though the Andersons, she felt him slip away into slumber.

*


	3. Wong

_March 2010_

“I have mentioned that I hate this…?” Keith groaned as he lay waiting on the bed.

“More than once,” Wong informed him pleasantly.

He had no complaints about Keith’s chronic insomnia. In fact, it was convenient on the whole. When the time came and he had served his purpose, it would make him that much easier to dispose of, and until then, it made him that much more irrational and suggestible.

The pharmacophobia, on the other hand, was a nuisance, particularly on those occasions when he needed Keith in full command of his powers to telepathically address an entire continent at once or crush buildings under glaciers. Planning ahead and putting him to sleep in preparation ought to be a simple matter, but not even the boy’s cultivated sense of leaderly dignity kept him from gagging on every form of oral medication, tearing inhalation masks off in a panic, or encasing syringes in blocks of ice. Because of that, Wong was careful to prepare the injection as soundlessly as possible and keep his body turned so as to shield it from Keith’s view. It was a nuisance to have to do these things himself, but it wasn’t as if he hadn’t mastered the skill in all his years of research.

He had even considered the possible advantages of arranging enough “crucial missions” in succession for Keith to become addicted to the drug and thus that much more dependent on him, but at least for now, it would be superfluous; he was already completely in control. Electronically distilled into numbers on paper, Keith’s powers dwarfed Wong’s by an order of magnitude, a disparity he could observe for himself every time Keith’s telepathy touched him, but Time and intelligence were the more potent substances. He could only smile at the enormity of his own kept dragon, so easily tethered with illusions of belonging and purpose, so easily led by Wong’s greater knowledge of the world and of strategy.

So easily destroyed, if he chose right now to fill the syringe another inch…

Keith heaved a sigh, and Wong, in a flash of catlike caprice, snipped that breath off halfway through, bringing down on it the still perfection of frozen time. With a practiced hand, he slid the needle into a vein just above Keith’s elbow, smoothly depressed the plunger, and drew it out. By then, maintaining the suspended moment was a strain — a problem he meant to solve someday soon — but he kept his grip long enough to take several steps back from the bed before consenting that the world move forward again.

Keith cried out and jumped in quite an undignified manner, but nothing more than that — this time. Perhaps he was improving.

“You see, over before you know it,” Wong assured him.

He let himself fall back against the pillow but was still breathing hard with a hand over his eyes.

Wong dropped the syringe into a disposal unit before approaching him and pressing a plaster to the drop of blood where the needle had gone in.

“Thank you,” Keith said at last.

“We should all be thanking you for your great efforts,” Wong told him sweetly. Privately, he thought that Keith might well thank him. His breath was slowing, surely a sign of the warm ease and euphoria that would already be sweeping over him…

“I know why it has to be done,” Keith said, his voice growing dull with distance, “but it must be… losing control… _God, I hate this feeling…_ ”

Well, Wong smiled to himself, “euphoria” was in the eye of the beholder, and such imperfections were to be expected when translating those promising numbers and laboratory notations into a flesh-and-blood creature — even a dragon like this. But it was serving its purpose tractably, so willing, for all its raw power and wounded ferocity, to fall asleep in its master’s hands.

*


	4. Brad

_May 2010_

Somehow a dream in the night touched it off this time, and Brad was savagely wrenched awake by the roar of every Psychiccer in who-knew-how-many miles flooding in on his brain in a torrent of minds so overwhelming that any distinct identity among them was swept away, even his own. He barely broke free of sleep in time to snatch the thin thread of his panic and cling for a moment to who he was — and who he didn’t want to be, his fragmentary memories of the voice that could stand against the current with a laughing vow to carve a blood-soaked silence, the crimsoned claws that would come out when he was inevitably swept under…

He was nearly lost when something rose above the din, at first only a formless nudge, but it held him and pressed forth on him more insistently until he could hear it as one distinct voice.

_…Brad?_ _…Brad!_

It was Keith calling him back from the brink again, and Brad clutched at him desperately. _Help me!_

As patiently as ever, Keith did help him, as if with a hand over his on the handle of a door, guiding him through the slow arc of drawing it closed against the voices until, with a gently jarring shudder, his mind was sealed again, and he was alone in the blessed silence.

He found himself prostrated on the floor, having unconsciously struggled out of bed, and he picked himself up and looked around at the familiar sight of the room to calm his still-pounding heart. Back when NOA’s headquarters had been a Psychic research laboratory, this had been the maximum security level, and now it was enough to keep Brad’s other self contained and limit its rampages to the ripples and claw-gouges in these walls and the twisted shreds of metal where there had once been robotic arms in the ceiling. Constantly looking at the damage had oppressed him at first, but now he was used to it, used to the multi-directional light that bathed the room day and night and cast petals of shadow around every feature, even used to limiting his comforts and personal touches to things he could smile at but wouldn’t have to cry over when they were inevitably destroyed. It was humble, certainly, beyond anything he could have imagined back in the lost horizon of his former, normal life, but it had become home.

…Which made the sudden intrusion of danger all the more unsettling when it happened. Tonight, it would be useless to try to go back to sleep. Better to use the time during the night when no one else was around for him to endanger or bother. He could tend his flowers, change out which ones were getting sun… Whoever was in C&C controlling the door locks and elevator knew that he was safe now — every Psychiccer for miles around could hear him rage when he wasn’t — and so he got dressed and went out.

No one knew why Brad was like this: why he was unable to telepathically “filter stimuli” so that it took Keith’s sheer signal strength to cut through the noise; why, once triggered, he couldn’t shut it down on his own no matter how many times Keith guided him through the motion; why his mind resorted to that kind of other self to cope with it… Wong had been studying it for months but declared himself baffled. Keith still told him not to give up hope of mastering it or being cured, and generally did everything possible to let him live here decently and feel useful despite the trouble it caused.

Most of the people who lived at NOA’s headquarters did so because they needed care or protection or had nowhere else to go where they could act as field agents, but even here, Brad was an outcast among outcasts. Even on a good day, he could make them uncomfortable with his tendency to say or ask or do things that came into his head even if they were awkward, out of fear that if he kept the ideas to himself they would tempt him into the trap of his broken telepathy. He could only thank God most of them hadn’t seen a bad day yet, although everyone knew what it looked like. Other Psychiccers would shy away from him in the hallways, surely thinking to each other where he couldn’t hear them or at times even whispering, “He’s the one who goes crazy and kills people.”

And who could blame them? After all, it was true — he _was_ uncomfortably awkward; he _did_ go crazy; he _had_ killed people. It left him feeling that his life was a debt, and it made him uneasy when he wasn’t somehow paying on it, but equally uneasy when he was, because he knew that with the slightest wrong move, the debt would only grow faster — certainly much faster than the trifle of keeping flowers around could repay anything, but hopefully they made life just a little bit better.

When he got off the elevator in the communal sector, the lonely echo of his footsteps on the metal floor sounded empty but reassuringly safe, and so he was surprised when he came to the library and saw the door open with a harder light slanting out from it. Diffidently, he edged inside. It was lit exactly as in the day but eerily night-silent — until, from somewhere among the shelves, he heard the not-quite-sniffle of someone drawing in a breath.

He thought that he should just quietly borrow the surgical cart cum book truck and take his flower pots and go, but a flash of blue down an aisle caught his eye. The familiar jacket and cape were thrown on one of the low tables, and it drew Brad closer until he found Keith leaning back in the center of a sectional sofa, nestled into the cushioned angle and reading a book.

“I’m sorry!” Brad lamented. “I woke you up.”

“No, you didn’t.” Keith managed a smile despite watery, dark-rimmed eyes and the serration of fatigue at the bottom of his voice. “It’s just no use tonight. I’ll get through tomorrow and then…”

“Are you all right? Is there anything I can do?”

He shook his head. “It isn’t the first time. Don’t let me keep you from what you were doing.”

Keith settled back into his book, and at first Brad accepted it meekly. He took his flowers and loaded them on the cart, but the prospect of leaving pulled against him like a tether. He didn’t know why he felt that debt most keenly with the person who most assiduously assured him that he didn’t owe a thing, but if he just walked away, he wouldn’t be able to get it out of his head, and that was always dangerous…

There was nothing else to do. He went back to the sofa and shyly but determinedly sat down. It might have been enough for him just to sit there until morning, but when Keith gave him a questioning look, he had to say something.

“Um… Is it a good book?”

“It’s a way to stay out of my own head. It’s strange, I used to like it there.”

The words resonated too deeply. Brad straightened and opened his mouth, but words eluded him.

“Well, everything outside was so awful then,” Keith explained. “That’s really all I mean.”

“Oh, I see…” Brad settled back against the cushions again, feeling reassured but also foolish to have presumed any comparison. He even knew the story, that Keith had been imprisoned here when it was still a horror-movie laboratory, on that same maximum security level. At first, those robot arms had cost Brad some sleep even with the promise that they weren’t going to move, and his other self had quickly been impelled to tear them to shreds. After it was all over, Keith had come down to comfort him and had stared at the twisted metal remains with a strangely open, abstracted look, but the memory of them — and who-knew-what else — couldn’t be broken so easily.

No, Keith wouldn’t be stranded in a minefield like Brad was, twisting himself into some half-human shape to navigate the debt and the traps and the flash-visions of blood; he wasn’t that weak. He just needed something to distract him from bad memories and help him relax.

“Maybe,” Brad ventured, “you need to get out of your head and into your body.”

Keith gave him a look, and he didn’t need telepathy to hear _I thought we had that conversation._

“No, not like that!” he insisted, defensively waving his hands. Even the fact that they _had_ had that conversation was still overwhelming beyond anything he would dare, and he ran back to his passing notion for shelter. “Just — come here, come here.”

Keith looked quizzical but didn’t resist as Brad took his arm, pulled him up from his seat, arranged him lying face-down on the sofa, and began massaging his shoulders. At first he tensed with a brittle, nervous energy, and Brad ran his palms in light, slow circles to let him get used to being touched before gradually building to a warming speed and pressure. “Have you ever had this done before?”

“No, never.”

“Well, you might have to bear with me, it’s been a while,” Brad admitted.

“’Been a while’?”

“Yes, I used to work in a spa before… everything.” It ached to be reminded of those times, but it gave him a little swell of pride how easily it was coming back to him as he perched his weight on the edge of the table beside the jacket and shifted to pattering his way down Keith’s back with the edges of loosely-curled hands.

“It still feels good,” Keith assured him, and laughed at how the percussion came through in his voice.

“It would be even better if I had some lavender oil,” got Brad another laugh, but that was good — the laughs were more honest. He could feel under his hands that Keith still wasn’t quite sure what to make of this, but gradually, under patient pressing and kneading and long, soothing strokes, he did relax until even his head, propped on his folded hands, began lolling side-to-side with the motions. Brad moved to support it, gently working the muscles in his neck and moving up the back of his head until he gave a distant, contented sigh that sounded almost like a purr.

Brad smiled at that, but in the next moment, his fingers slowed. Pushing up into Keith’s hair lifted it off his nape to reveal the inch of bare skin above the high neck of his black shirt. There, the dotted tracks of surgical scars traced up each side of his spine and into his hair, where they branched and dissolved into some invisible pattern over his skull. Brad had been feeling those roughened places and knew what they were, but it was another thing to see the lines, see his own hands touching where, not so very long ago, someone had laid Keith face-down much like this and traced with a knife…

_—Blood—_

For one flash he _saw_ it — a scarlet stain welling up hot under his fingertips. It shot through his chest and sent him flying back as he snapped his hands clear and caught himself before falling back over the table. His heart hammered _What was I thinking — if the claws had come out then—!_ But it was an “if.” It was his own lone voice ringing in his head, and outside only the fluorescent lights buzzing low and cold in the silence. He stared at his hands — not a trace of blood no matter how closely he looked.

“Hmm?” Keith’s hair was still blue-white like fresh snow as he drowsily lifted his head.

“It… it’s okay.” Brad pressed gently into his shoulders again, making certain to keep his nails aimed away from the skin. Keith must have been too nearly asleep to realize what had happened. It would be too miraculous or too suicidal for him to know and be so unfazed, and it was too late to disturb him now. Still, Brad was sure that the lingering fear must be coming through in his touch; it was gnawing at him, maybe pulling him into a trap, and he had to say _something…_

“You… Why do you trust me?”

“Mmh.” Keith settled his temple on his hands, showing an oblique sliver of another tired smile. “I think I’m supposed to say something noble here.”

“Well, that’s not… not really…”

“It’s actually selfish, you know.” The smile fell. His eyes were closed, but that sleepy, watery sparkle had lodged droplets in his lashes. “If I didn’t believe in you, I couldn’t believe in myself…”

For Brad, that was noble and generous enough to steady him, although he still didn’t quite trust his own hands and moved into pressing and pivoting with his elbows. If nervousness could be felt in his touch, Keith seemed to pay it no mind, but lay quietly until at last his breath fell into the heedless nonrhythm of sleep.

Brad crept away and took his cart of flowers, but he had had enough for now. He found a piece of paper to write “Do Not Disturb,” tucked the edge under one of the flower pots, and left the cart in front of the library door as he left.

*


	5. Carlo

_September 2010_

The U.S. Army cyborg was still falling, spraying electric sparks and water, as Carlo darted forward to where Keith lay on the floor. He hadn’t moved from where he’d fallen. There was blood in his hair, and Carlo reached out desperately for his mind, cursing every wasted second in the minutes of searching corridors, the hours since Regina had somehow miraculously made contact — the nearly five days since headquarters had gone silent.

It was a wash of relief when Keith groaned and tensed in his hands, trying even in part to rise under his own power. He lifted his head, and Carlo found his blue eyes…

Keith’s mind swept over his like a deluge, chaotic and irresistible. Words struggled to the surface amid formless confusion.

_I know you. I should be able to think of your name. I should be able to remember… everyone’s name…_

Fragmented images from the last five days flooded in: the words “extermination sequence” flashing on a screen, the steel-paneled halls stretching on in an endless maze unbroken even by food or sleep, their floors strewn with bodies that poison gas had left cruelly pristine — as if they should wake up and start moving again, but they never did.

Their names…

_Sonia… Brad…_ Those names rose up like icebergs, nearly crushing him.

Others danced through the air like snowflakes, so close at hand but melting in his grasp if he tried to remember. He should be able to remember…

Who should be able to remember?

What brought Carlo back to himself was the dull, distant boom of an explosion outside.

_Regina!_

She’d found the fuel tank on something, and when he reached out to her mind he found her flitting around through the ensuing chaos, dodging U.S. Army bullets.

_Don’t get carried away._

_You always criticize_ , she replied, turning away with the facetious pout that always made him worry she wasn’t taking things seriously.

Keith struggled weakly in his arms. He’d heard the explosion, too. “ _someone is… i have to…_ ”

“No,” Carlo declared. “You’ve done enough for now.”

A glance confirmed that the cyborg was no longer a threat, and he hoisted Keith’s arm over his shoulder and glided over the floor with him. Despite the gravity of the situation — no, because of it, because this moment had come at the bottom of the darkness when all seemed lost — his heart swelled with pride and awe.

The bodies on the floor he’d seen in those visions were gone now. Keith had spent the last five days burying everyone they’d lost himself.

That had always been the sense that drew people to him, that there was someone who cared about them — who cared about them as Psychiccers, didn’t see their powers as a shameful secret or a plaything or a danger, but valued them for who they really were. If there had ever been any doubt that that care was genuine, there could be no doubt now. Keith’s loss of his people had nearly destroyed him, and still he hadn’t let himself rest until he’d done what he could for them.

What disgusting cowards the humans were to attack him now, when his altruism had left him in this condition! And even now they didn’t dare _face_ him; they’d sent a _machine_. That such a thing had been able even to touch Keith Evans was proof of how far he’d been willing to push himself.

And proof that he couldn’t push himself any further — but he would still try. Carlo didn’t dare leave him alone. Not alone and conscious.

He would just have to trust Regina to take care of herself for a little longer.

After all, Carlo thought, Keith had chosen him — had chosen the two of them. When Keith wasn’t responding to anyone else, they had been the ones to reach him. There had to be a reason.

When they arrived at the infirmary, Keith squeezed his eyes shut and moaned as he began to struggle again. There was a reason for that, too, something particular that he was resisting, but Carlo didn’t have time to sift the sleep-deprived chaos of his mind looking for what it was. Instead he found his way around the resistance and managed to maneuver Keith into a bed.

Trying to use a soporific drug would be risky; Carlo had heard enough to know that — everyone he’d ever spoken to at headquarters was gone, no time to think about it now — and without the quick and easy option, he could only try the best method he knew and trust in its efficiency.

It was what he used to do for Regina, to calm her down when they were younger, in the old days before she’d armored herself with those cynical faces that even he couldn’t see behind.

Someday she wouldn’t need them. Yes, all was not lost. They would rebuild. The work would continue, until someday…

But for what Carlo had to do now, he needed to focus on the present, put himself into a state of calm and equanimity.

He needed to _be_ water.

He telepathically took Keith, held him and carried him as water might carry him, if he were floating down a peaceful stream. Trying this with someone whose mind was confused and agitated was nothing new, but Carlo had to push back that sense of awe to brave the sheer scale of it. Still, the pull of exhaustion had been building for days; it shouldn’t take much of an additional push, shouldn’t take long if he just created the scene the way he always had.

The gentle rocking and caress of the current… The cool, pure scent and softly laughing sound…

When she was younger, Regina used to wonder where the stream was carrying her, and he would imagine for her that it was a beautiful place of peace and freedom, and that they would get there, just as inevitably as water would find the sea.

Keith didn’t wonder where the stream was going. On him, it wasn’t working at all. Despite his exhaustion, he clung on stubbornly against the flow. Carlo finally had to shift his psychic stance to avoid the edge of impatience — and as he did, he caught the flicker of half-formed thought and saw what it was that Keith was clinging to.

It was the thought of a physical object right there in the infirmary with them — and it was the same thing he’d fought to resist when they arrived. Somehow he shied away from it even as he gripped it. He was afraid to let his eyes see it, but he couldn’t let himself fall asleep without seeing it.

It was one of the life support pods.

Carlo looked. From that angle, he couldn’t see who was inside, but the indicator lights were green. Whoever it was, they were alive. There was at least one other survivor.

Keith’s telepathy suddenly enveloped him again, seeming to fill the entire room with a wintry sigh of relief as he relaxed, eased his desperate hold on consciousness…

*


	6. Regina

_December 2011_

Sometimes Keith got crabby. Regina knew not to say it like that in front of her brother, but there was just no other word for it. Usually he cast his exhaustion in a noble light — part of the sham, part of the uniform that he hid behind — but sometimes he took it too far. He went from stonily quiet to selfishly taciturn, from unsmiling gravity to sour frowning, and when you reached out to his mind you met thoughtlessly sharp, icy edges.

Regina had learned not to fear those. She could touch them and not get cut, although the weep of frigid meltwater — that was what it felt like in her mind — was messier than she wanted to deal with.

He didn’t need a therapy session anyway. Like he’d even remember it later, as tired as he was. He just needed to be put to bed, and she had a good old-fashioned method. It was even one of her talents.

Carlo had been the one to figure out that rich normals would throw money at you if you acted like a good little pet and used your powers to do tricks for them — and that they weren’t terribly good at keeping track of what you did with the money afterward. But Regina had tried to do her part. After years of practice, using her powers to create just the right temperature in just the right place with the same precision that served her so well in a fight…

After all that, the one thing Carlo never found fault with was her cooking.

But then, branding monograms on perfectly-seared Kobe beef hadn’t been her only method of keeping big spenders on the client list. That she’d kept to herself, never let anything happen where Carlo could see, never let a hint of it slip out beyond the walls of her own mind where he could hear it. Not even the question — _Big Brother, do you know?_ She was too afraid of the answer, but surely he didn’t know. She liked to think he’d have shown it if he did. She liked to think there’d have been a body count if he did.

Thankfully _that_ was all behind her.

Somehow cooking had never picked up the taint of the job, and today she had enjoyed putting everything aside, leave recruiting and missions and skirmishes with those Army traitors and all of it outside the door and seize the kitchen as her kingdom, where everything was under her control and everything was perfect — even perfect enough for Carlo to nod in satisfied silence. She wanted to get better than that from him, but then, there were a lot of things she kept behind her walls because it was better if he didn’t know…

It was a little flare of temper, that she was making the meal for Keith and not him. It brought up the memory of having to look her brother — her angel of a brother — in the eye and tell him she wanted to be with someone _else_ … And that was Keith’s fault, the brat.

_What am I, a little girl? I have to ask permission?_

But she’d said that at the time, and he’d answered it — _You don’t. I do._ It wasn’t worth it to him to have drama about it later.

Well, it wasn’t like it was worth it to her, either, really. If it hadn’t put her in such a temper it never would have been worth it to her to face that moment, looking her brother in the eye and not letting a hint of the truth slip out because dammit, she was already the messiest thing in his life without him knowing _that_ …

The worst part of it was that he’d smiled. He was happy about it. He probably thought they were really in love and was hoping they’d get married or have children or something, and no. Just no. She couldn’t even tell the truth _about_ the lie. _Yes, Big Brother, your charismatic leader and I are each using the other one as a substitute for the people we really want and can’t have, we’re just willing to live with it and it’s nice to have_ somebody _to sleep with._

There was no way she was telling him that.

But it might as well have happened the way it did. Avoiding it wouldn’t have gotten her anything better — nothing was going to get her what she really wanted — and it was nice to have somebody. It was a bit of comfort amid this whole mess. Honestly, Keith’s take-it-or-leave-it coolness was preferable to other attitudes she’d had to deal with, and he needed something to take his mind off things, too. Something besides sighing over his “best friend” in a life-support pod, anyway.

It was nice to have somebody, but it left her playing second-best to Sleeping Beauty. And some dead people, whom she tried hard not to resent.

It also left Regina with the job of dealing with Keith when he was crabby.

This time, though, her plan was going well so far. He hadn’t argued with the pretext of a candlelight dinner at his place. It was almost Christmas, so she had an excuse to roast a goose — even more tryptophan than turkey! But then, people said it was really the carbohydrates that did it, so she made sure to have plenty of those, too: stuffing and potatoes and pie…

She was cleared for access to his quarters, and she had everything ready and waiting when he got back from whatever it was he was trying to do with no sleep. When she heard him coming, she lit the candles from across the room with a practiced touch.

“Welcome home!” she greeted, and gave him her hand. That was what he usually preferred to kiss.

He started to raise her hand to his face, but got lost halfway when he saw the dinner. He stopped and blinked at it.

She nudged at his mind to try to see what was going on. Wherever he’d been, he’d been trying to keep up appearances, so he’d largely shut himself down. Alone with her, though, and tired as he was, he was liable to get careless. Soon she caught it.

_What day is it…?_

With a feast like that on the table, he was afraid it was really Christmas and he’d somehow forgotten, and as he tried to figure it out, his brain was too exhausted to do anything but tie itself in knots.

She laughed and took pity on him as she led him to his chair. “I know, it’s a couple of weeks early, but I thought when it gets closer everything will be so hectic, let’s have something just for the two of us while we can.” She sat him down to a plate already piled with goose and stuffing and potatoes — she wasn’t going to let him get away with serving himself small portions.

And she hadn’t neglected herself, either. Yes, Regina thought, she had done a good job. The goose breast was rich and just the right medium-rare shade of pink, the stuffing was moist and spongy with a crusty layer that was her own special trick, and the roast potatoes had that perfect crunch…

At first she didn’t want to distract Keith from his food, but soon the time came when she judged it advantageous to distract him from just how much of it he was eating.

“So,” she asked, “what do you want for Christmas?”

“Hmm.” He thought about it very slowly.

She gave him room to think, and used the lull to pile more goose and stuffing on his plate and refill her wine glass. She noticed that his was also nearly empty, which was better for her plan than she could’ve hoped for. Usually he abandoned drinks at the first hint of felt effect and she was lucky if he drained an inch. Refilling it might risk drawing his attention to it, though, so instead she quietly switched glasses with him while he was staring off into space.

He finally gave a soft sniff and tried to flash a smile without much success. “I can’t think of anything,” he said. “Everything I can think of, if I think about it more I don’t really want it now.”

“Well, what are some of the things you thought of?”

Another long pause. “A cat.”

“Oh, that would be cute! What would be wrong with getting you a cat?”

He shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t want to have one now… here. That was just my favorite thing someone got me once. It was my birthday, not Christmas.”

_There’s Sleeping Beauty again_ , Regina noticed.

“What about you?” he asked, rubbing his brow.

Keith always acted put-upon when it came to getting presents. _You know, that just annoys people_ — but she didn’t have the heart to tell him that. It was true enough that online stores didn’t deliver to the “evil Psychiccer terrorists,” but she knew people on the outside who could get things, and it was Keith for goodness’ sake! He could ask anyone —

But that was the rub, he’d have to ask.

For the moment she just decided to miss the point of the question. “My favorite present I ever got?” she said. “Hmm… It was a pair of shoes.”

“Shoes?”

“Mm-hm. They were white patent leather, and they had bows with gold buttons. I’d just fallen in love with them. Big Brother said they weren’t practical, but then for Christmas he got them for me.” She smiled at the memory of opening the box, the surprise of finding those “impractical” shoes nestled in tissue paper…

And then she was jarred out of it by an annoying feeling, like an echo of her earlier mental remark — _“there’s Sleeping Beauty again”_ — was coming back to her.

She made up her mind to ignore it and pressed on. “At first I thought I’d wear them everywhere, although Carlo said I’d wear them out if I did that. Sure enough, the very first day they got a scuff, right on the toe. I never wore them again after that, just kept them in the box, even after I’m sure I’d outgrown them. Then they got lost in a move, so they’re probably still in Atlanta.”

She felt Keith making a valiant but doomed effort to fit Atlanta into the scheme of moves and cities she’d told him about. “You’ve lived a lot of places,” he said finally, in token of surrender.

“They were always moving us around so no one would find out,” she said. “Of course, you know Carlo. Even back then, he probably could have hid his powers forever if it hadn’t been for me…”

That struck such a sharp echo off Keith’s mind that it brought her up short. He just stared blankly at her until she started casting about for something to say to break the moment.

“Chicago always was my favorite, out of the places we went,” she said. She could tell him a story from when they’d been leading the field agents there. He always liked those stories…

But before she could decide on one, he spoke. “Did you ever think of leaving?”

“Leaving Chicago?”

“No,” he said, quicker than his foggy brain should be able to answer anything. “I mean, if he would have been all right without you…”

“Oh, of course I didn’t think of it!” Regina tossed the question aside. “All we had was each other, after all. They did think about moving just me a time or two, but he wouldn’t let them.”

Keith stared off into space again. When she tried to see what was happening with him, she found that the dinner was having its intended effect. He was so sleepy that he couldn’t follow the thread of whatever he was thinking of — but that was bothering him. Not good for her plan.

“Well—” she started.

He turned toward her voice, half-startled, and his eyes showed an unguarded thought as they met hers. _It’s no wonder you're in love with him._

Regina started back, her cheeks flushing hot. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known that he knew about that, but usually he had the good manners not to point it out. “Oh, be quiet,” she said, although technically he _had_ been quiet. “Let’s have the pie before it gets cold.”

That was a ridiculous excuse coming from her, but he was too tired to catch her at it. Anyway, he hadn’t touched his latest helping of goose, so the pie was her best hope of getting more food into him, hopefully enough to tip the balance. Plus it gave her a chance to turn her back for a minute and escape the awkwardness they’d gotten into.

Thankfully the pie did distract him from it and calm him down, and the plan was back on track. By the time he put his fork down, he was fading fast. Now all she needed was an opportune moment.

It came when she started to clear the table, and he got up to help her.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she said, taking his hand and leaning toward his ear with practiced sweetness. “You look like you’re ready for your after-dinner nap.”

He pulled her hand closer and turned toward her, so that she found herself hovering toward his lips instead. “Not necessarily.”

Before Regina could stop herself, she dropped the honeyed pretense and laughed out loud. “You _cannot_ be serious!” Maybe he felt like it — which she doubted — but she’d stuffed herself, too, and she certainly didn’t. Besides, “You’re too tired to make it worth it.”

She felt his soft shock at being thwarted, but it wasn’t _that_ kind of thwarted, more like the vexation of a child who wasn’t getting his way. _You just don’t want to go to sleep, you brat!_ She gave it an answer it deserved. “Would it be better if I tuck you in and read you a story?”

After a moment, he decided to take the barb with a weary smile. She caught him thinking about someone else, and somehow it involved a phone book — well, reading him a phone book might do it if she didn’t fall asleep before he did. She also caught a ridiculous note of receptivity, as if a tucking-in and a bedtime story really was what he wanted. That wasn’t the kind of thing anyone, let alone “Master Keith,” just let people see. How long had he gone without sleep this time, anyway?

Still, she was willing to play along, and she led him into the bedroom. “Well, get into your pajamas, then. I won’t look,” she said, turning her back, at once teasing and maintaining her boundary. She didn’t need to look; it wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen it before. It always struck her how narrow his shoulders really were under the jacket, much narrower than her brother’s…

Just for good measure, she tossed over her shoulder, “Brat.”

He made a soft grunt of displeasure. He didn’t exactly like it when she did that, but he let her get away with it, which she was sure no one else could say. But then she was pretty sure no one else would try it to begin with.

And even Regina wouldn’t try it in front of Carlo.

She did tuck Keith into bed, even gave him a good-night kiss on the forehead, but she wasn’t about to actually read him a story, or sing a lullabye. She did have her limits. Instead, she created just the right amount of warmth under the blankets — she’d learned exactly where his comfort level was — and sat down on the edge of the bed beside him.

He was quiet, but he was still there, stubbornly awake.

She reached down and rubbed his shoulder, with enough careful heat in her fingers to nudge the upper boundary of pleasantness. _I am not going to sing. I swear to God I am not going to sing._

He didn’t want her to. Again, he was thinking of someone else.

No big surprise. Regina had her own idea of why, after what Wong had done to headquarters, the one psychic voice Keith had responded to had been the one that felt like fire.

Well, it wasn’t as if she were any different.

“Hopeless cases like us have to stick together, don’t we?” she muttered.

The reflection of her own voice on Keith’s mind was just a murky, half-asleep blur, and then it was gone.

*


	7. Burn

_Four Years Earlier…_

_August 2008_

Some time after midnight, Keith looked up at the window of the motel room. The engines of the cars on the highway were muffled to soft breaths of sound as they passed. Their lights were disembodied points of red and white floating across the glass, flickering between the vertical blinds. Any other image from the darkness outside was obliterated by the reflection of the room, carved in ivory by the light of the table lamp.

Keith could look into the window like a mirror and see himself sitting on the couch with a book on his lap. He was too tired and distracted to read it; he kept trying the same page and every time found himself halfway down it having absorbed nothing. But he couldn’t sleep, either, and now he just stared at the reflection in the glass, trying to read his own face.

He wasn’t having much more luck with it than he was with the book. Were those dark rings under his eyes, or just shadows? Was he really so unreadable, or was he just unable to see it, that what he was thinking was actually written across his face?

What _was_ he thinking?

_This cannot end well._

Burn snored and tossed in the room’s lone bed, and the sound of shifting softness cut sharply through the still lamplight.

No, Keith knew that this could not end well.

Not with the way it had started.

He flinched from his own reflection at the memory — the men in black suits and sunglasses standing like invaders in the Griffiths’ living room, the family dog lying dead on the floor and then… Time seemed to slow to a crawl. The first man’s eyes were still hidden behind sunglasses but his mouth twisted in terror at the mass of ice that had blossomed around his hands, around his pistol, and in the silence before the scream Keith could hear a tiny hissing sound and realized that it was the bullet, caught in the ice, still spinning. When the second man reached for a weapon, Keith lashed out in panic. That time, the ice caught the man’s head, and he crumpled, writhing sickeningly as he struggled for air.

After that, all Keith could think of was to make it stop. Make it _end_ —

It was never going to end. At least not well.

Time had quickened again into a blur. The next thing he could remember was Burn pushing him into the passenger seat of the pickup truck and driving away.

But there was nowhere to drive to.

They’d called home, and somehow, so far, Burn’s parents had escaped blame for the two corpses from whatever government agency they sent after rogue Psychiccers — or had they? Was it just a false sense of safety? A trap? Whatever it was, Keith couldn’t go back.

He couldn’t go forward, either, because there was nowhere to go. And in the meantime, the men in black wouldn’t just let him escape. They were somewhere close behind, searching. They could burst in at any moment and take him — and worse, take Burn too, because of him. Already they’d caught up more than once and Keith had lashed out again with his power, with whatever it took to get free of them.

More screams, more twisting bodies, cracks in the ice filling with fine crimson veils of blood…

It had started to feel good.

No, not _good_ exactly; he could tell himself he wasn’t that horrible, not yet, but it had started to feel like something, like hope or power.

Not enough of it, though. Not enough to make this end well.

Trying to reason with Burn was no use.

If Keith tried to say, _What are we going to do?_ , Burn just told him that it would be all right. He never explained how that could possibly happen, but somehow, before long, Keith found himself believing it, or at least not thinking about it.

Keith didn’t even try to say, _What have I done?_ The closest they’d come to that was at a fast-food place when he had ordered the smallest hamburger possible. Burn had leaned over to him with serious eyes and asked, _What, don’t you think you deserve to eat?_ He’d tried to argue. It was enough calories, he’d looked it up; he’d flatly refused any more food — and Burn had promptly bent the rule with a cup of hot chocolate. And somehow, before long…

Then as soon as he was alone — and he was always alone at night, because ever since that awful scene in the living room he could never fall asleep — it all came back, and his mind ran in tightening circles until books became unreadable and he couldn’t face himself in a pane of glass…

If he was going to do anything, talking to Burn about it wouldn’t do any good. It would be the same as talking himself out of it, and then they’d just be going on the same doomed way.

Keith thought he could sneak out of the room. He could go out to the highway and see if one of those cars would pick him up. Stories that started that way tended not to end well either, but did that matter, really? If it was only him…

He turned his back on the reflection in the window and stared at the door instead. He could read himself better in its wood grain and fire exit map, and he willed himself to get up and walk through it. That would be enough. If he did that, then in another narrative thread Burn would go home — he’d be frantic, he’d search, but in the end he’d have to go home — and maybe…

Burn didn’t know his own power. He knew that he was a Psychiccer, that he and Keith could talk to each other’s minds — Burn only knew how to do it if they were directly touching each other, skin-to-skin — but he didn’t know what Keith felt when they touched that way, the blazing fire… Burn didn’t know how close it had come to bursting forth, coming closer at every brush with danger.

Keith had tried to make sure that he didn’t know. Maybe he never would know. Maybe no one would ever know, and there would be no reason for anyone to come after him, if the two of them weren’t together.

And all Keith had to do was walk out the door. With tremendous effort he unfolded one leg, lowered it over the side of the couch, placed one foot on the floor…

The other wouldn’t move. He pushed himself as hard as he could, but instead of getting him onto his feet, it doubled him over with his face in his hands.

The book fell on the floor. Each page rang out in the silence like rippling sheet metal.

When he leaned over to pick it up, he heard the hiss of the bedsheets.

“You’re still up?” Burn asked.

“Yeah,” Keith admitted, obviously.

“Nngh, what time is it, anyway?” Burn stretched himself out from the nest of bed coverings, grabbed the clock on the nightstand and grumbled.

“I just… I can’t sleep.”

Burn scrubbed his face with one hand, his red-streaked forelock sagging sideways at a charmingly awkward angle. Finally he let out his breath in a decisive sigh and hauled himself out of bed. “Well. Only one thing to do.”

Keith dropped his book on the couch as Burn took his arm, dragged him back to the bed and half-pushed him into it.

“You don’t have to. I mean, it won’t…” Keith argued half-heartedly, knowing it wouldn’t do any good.

Indeed, Burn took no notice and pulled the covers up around him. “Scooch over.”

Keith should have known what that meant, but somehow it didn’t occur to him. He just shuffled himself across the mattress without thinking and was completely taken by surprise when Burn flopped down beside him and threw his arms around his neck.

“I’ll just have to snuggle you.”

Keith’s mind went perfectly white, blank of anything to think or say as he lay there in Burn’s arms, suddenly very warm but utterly frozen. “Um,” he finally managed, “isn’t this kind of…?”

“Shut up. Go to sleep,” Burn cut him off with abrupt kindness.

He still didn’t know what to think. He _couldn’t_ think — his cheek was laying on the muscle of Burn’s arm, skin against skin. Anything he thought, Burn would hear, and he couldn’t tell him… He just lay there blinking.

“Well, close your eyes already.” Burn’s own eyes were closed. He wasn’t looking, he just knew.

“Oh! Right.” Keith was taken by surprise again, and there was nothing to do but comply.

And then there was nothing. He couldn’t think. All that was in his mind was what his senses poured into the emptiness, and now with his eyes closed…

Behind his eyelids it wasn’t exactly dark, but there was nothing to see except the light of the still-burning lamp filtering through in a gentle glow of red and shifting colors, fleeting and meaningless. The only things he could hear were the tiny unfamiliar clicks and hums of the room that sounded so unlike a home — and Burn. With his ear resting on Burn’s arm, Keith could hear the muscles twitch; he could hear Burn’s breath gradually slowing and taking on a shade of a snore. He barely even felt the blankets, he was so caught up in the closeness as he lay there and Burn fell asleep, arms still around him.

It went past the point of being comforting or even comfortable, but just as he couldn’t think, he couldn’t move. He could only lay there amid that enveloping warmth, that gentle red glow.

It took a long time.

He didn’t know when it happened.

But just like that…

He fell asleep.

*

END


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